


Blind Enough

by Stayawhile



Category: Vorkosigan Saga - Lois McMaster Bujold
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-01-05
Updated: 2011-01-05
Packaged: 2017-10-14 10:52:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,902
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/148470
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Stayawhile/pseuds/Stayawhile
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A missing moment from <i>The Warrior's Apprentice</i>.  Cordelia has a rather Betan conversation with her very Barrayaran son.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Blind Enough

 

Lady Cordelia Vorkosigan hesitated outside the elaborately carved wooden door, which still, even after so many years, seemed almost obscenely luxurious to her Betan sensibilities. Her faltering was uncharacteristic, for the Lord Regent’s Lady was known for moving decisively through Barrayaran society, ignoring or manipulating its pressures and prejudices at need. While she brought an outsider’s objectivity to most situations, she had never, in sixteen years, managed to be anything but fiercely partisan on behalf of her only son.

She had thought Beta Colony would be good for him, a chance to see past the walls that Barrayar had placed around him. Since his return, though, she wondered if she’d made the right choice in sending him off-planet. He had been, by turns, morose and silent, or sulky and rude, beyond even the minimal standards of classic fifteen-year-old behavior. More frightening to his parents, he had flung himself into what he called “training for the Academy” with a physical aggression that bordered on self-destructive.

Sergeant Bothari had been no help at all. When she’d finally asked, point-blank, just what had happened on Beta, Miles’ saturnine bodyguard had stared balefully at his boots, and finally said, “I cannot say, Milady.”

“Cannot, because you don’t know, or because Miles ordered you not to say?” Loyalty was Bothari’s primary virtue, but in this case it might be misplaced, she thought.

“It’s better that you ask Lord Miles, Milady.” She had dismissed him with a sharp glance, resolving to do just that.

“No use putting it off,” she muttered to herself, and rapped on the door for courtesy’s sake, not expecting an answer. After waiting a moment, she opened it, to be greeted by a snarled “Go away!”

A surly phase, she deduced. Probably better for starting a conversation than a morose one. “And what if I won’t?” she asked cheerfully.

“Oh, it’s you.” The comconsole chair turned, revealing his small figure slumped in front of a tactical game. She pulled up a chair and sat, regarding him thoughtfully.

“Good afternoon to you too, Miles. How’s your hand?” He had broken two fingers the day before, trying to climb an exterior wall of Vorkosigan House. At least he hadn’t fallen and snapped his spine.

“Healing.” He stared back at her. She could detect a glitter of anger in his eye. Something to work with, she supposed.

“Good. How’s your head?”

“My head?”

“Have you extracted it yet?” she asked. “Because whatever happened on Beta Colony, it seems to have gotten stuck in a rather unpleasant place, and I’m sure you’re as tired of it as I am.” No response. She looked around. The elegant proportions of the high-ceilinged room and its furnishings were concealed under a clutter of discarded clothing, crumpled flimsies and used plates.

Silence. She decided to take a shot. “So, is it your love life? Girl problems?”

Silence, with an added glare.

“Or maybe, boy problems?”

That got a reaction, at least. “No! No! Mother… how could you think I would--!” He shook his head. “Betans!” She noted that the last word mirrored the exasperated tone of her usual epithet, ‘Barrayarans!’

“Well, that’s just as well. If your interests lay in that direction, Beta would be the place to find out, but it would present some difficulty at home.”

He let out a brief, humorless laugh. “Now there’s an understatement. But don’t worry about me. Boys, girls, Beta, Barrayar, across the galaxy. It’s irrelevant.”

Cordelia considered this outburst. “Ah. So is the issue here girls in general, across the galaxy, or one girl in particular?”

Why bother, Miles thought. His mother was inexorable when she wanted something. She would be calm and gentle and tactful, and then deliver a blunt hammerblow of logic that could shatter — well, even Simon Ilyan, the blandly unnerving chief of ImpSec. He didn’t have the energy to resist her brand of verbal judo, and maybe she — well, she was a galactic. She wouldn’t be shocked, at any rate.

“It isn’t girls,” he started. “I mean — it is girls that I’m interested in, don’t get any weird Betan ideas about that. But they’re not the problem. I am.” He got up and began pacing, his speech speeding up as he poured out his tangled emotions. “I knew that this, this body of mine, was always going to be a disadvantage at home. Everybody thinks I’m a mutant and, even if I explain that I’m not, my DNA is fine, I’m still not… well, no Barrayaran girl wants a guy whose eyes are level with her chest.” He glanced at his mother, who appeared calmly interested.

“But you said it was different on Beta. You told me how Betans are more accepting of differences and all that. So I figured maybe, somebody there, some girl might, I don’t know, like me. Or at least get to know me well enough to hate me for my own sake and not because of what I look like.”

She sighed, inwardly. “And that didn’t happen?” She had to admit to herself that, while Miles could be certainly be charming, he was energetic to the point of hyperactivity. Any girl who got to know him well enough to get past his physical peculiarities might well be exhausted by his intensity.

He was stomping back and forth now, his leg brace punctuating each step with a quiet click. “Oh, I thought it happened. She let me think she liked me. She’s a galactic, from Marilac, and she’s got a great sense of humor, and she’s adventurous.”

Cordelia twisted a loose sleeve button between two fingers, waiting.

He stopped in his tracks. “Turns out that’s all I was,” he said bitterly. “An adventure. An exotic toy to add to her collection of memories. Boys, girls, hermaphrodites, mutants, collect the whole set. She said she wanted to sleep with a quaddie someday, if she ever got the chance. In zero-G.”

What a start for a young man’s sexual life, she thought. At the moment when he most needed to feel like a man, to instead be treated as no more than an unusual plaything. On the other hand, at least it sounded like his sexual life had begun, which was one of the things she’d rather hoped would happen on Beta. Time to focus on the positive.

“So, you did sleep with her?” she inquired.

“Yeah,” he muttered.

“Did you enjoy it?”

He stared at her. Blinked. “Well, yeah. I mean, it was…” Sighed. “Yes, Mother, since you ask, I did enjoy it.”

She ignored the sarcasm. “Did she enjoy it?”

“I cannot believe I am having this conversation with you.” She met his eye with a glint of humor.

“Better me than Bothari,” she said He grinned, briefly.

“Yeah, really. Has he even been with a woman since Elena’s mother?” Bothari had been Miles’ constant companion since he was born, and Miles had never heard the Sergeant mention a woman’s name, other than Mistress Hysopi, the elderly foster-mother of his daughter Elena. He’d always wondered.

She considered this question. “There may have been women. There has not been anything one could call a relationship, and nothing I’d want you to emulate.” Poor Sergeant Bothari’s sexual history was definitely nothing a vulnerable fifteen-year-old needed to hear, even if she’d had the right to tell it. “When I said better me than Bothari, that wasn’t really a joke, Miles. If you want to talk about sex, ask me. Or your father, or even, God help us, Ivan. It’s rather a difficult topic for the Sergeant.”

Miles sat back down in the comconsole chair, resisting the impulse to swivel away from his mother’s gaze. He hadn’t exactly talked to Bothari about what had happened with Gerilyn, which he guessed was just as well. They hadn’t even really discussed the stupidly suicidal aftermath, which the Sergeant had interrupted. There had simply been a brief struggle, with a thoroughly predictable ending, since his bodyguard was capable of protecting Miles from far more dangerous assailants than himself. After taking away the knife, Bothari had methodically searched the room for any other potential weapons. He had then extracted Miles’ promise to refrain from further attempts, on his word as Vorkosigan, in exchange for a reciprocal pledge to never mention the incident again. Denied the escape from humiliation offered by a quick death, Miles had settled for a deep, wordless depression. He had made an effort to be more communicative once he returned to Barrayar, but had been unable to mask the bleakness of his mood.

Cordelia pulled herself back from her contemplation of the Sergeant’s history to focus on the matter at hand. While she wasn’t exactly sure where she wanted this conversation to go, Bothari was clearly a side track. “So, did the young lady in question enjoy herself as much as you did?”

He took a deep breath. “Well, I thought so, at the time. I’d watched some of the porn-vids and read the books Grandmother left in the guest room, so I kind of knew what I was doing. And height differences don’t really matter when you’re lying down. She seemed to, uh… react pretty positively.” It was funny, Miles thought. His mother was so utterly immune to embarrassment that you could say the most humiliating things in front of her, and she would act as if you’d asked for another helping of cream cakes. On the other hand, things that any Barrayaran took for granted could elicit that look of hers, the one that made you feel like your skin had been peeled back, and what lay within judged and found observably substandard.

“Well,” she commented with a mischievous smile, “I know that I can count on you to do your very best at anything you attempt. It’s an advantage of that competitive side of yours.” She stood. “Was it only the one time, or did you see her again?”

Miles sighed. “A couple of times. That’s what made me imagine she actually liked me. But then she moved on to the next target. I tried to figure out what I’d done wrong. Then I overheard her talking to another girl. She said I wasn’t bad at all, for a dwarf.” Even though he’d carefully explained, as a prelude to what he thought was his seduction of her, that his damaged bones were due to a prenatal accident, not genetic mutation.

“So even out there in the galaxy, I’m still a freak. Although I suppose some woman will eventually put up with me for the title and the money. Somebody might be willing to marry Count Vorkosigan’s heir, but I can’t…” Miles sat down heavily in the comconsole chair. His next words were almost too low to hear. “She won’t want me.”

Cordelia rose and looked out the window, past the near-invisible sparkle of the force screen. She could not set up a force screen around her son’s heart, not without crippling him far worse than the soltoxin damage. “Well, kiddo, you’ve been used. You’re not the first person it’s happened to and it may well happen again. I can tell you from personal experience, though, it’s survivable.”

He didn’t speak.

She went on, hoping that what she had to say was what he needed to hear. “People go to bed with each other for all sorts of reasons. If you get lucky, they include love and mutual respect. Other times, it’s just physical desire or to not feel alone. Sometimes, it’s about pain, the need to give it or receive it. Sometimes it’s about domination or emotional control. You’d be surprised.”

He sighed. “I guess thought it would be easier on Beta. At least they don’t try to pretend sex doesn’t exist.”

Cordelia thought back to her teenage years on Beta and how embarrassing she had found the obligatory medical appointment and ritual ear-piercing. Her declared availability and contraceptive safety had remained irrelevant to the boys around her for several years. “No, the pretenses around sex are completely different on Beta. They like to imagine it can be managed into harmlessness, the same way they manage the planetary environment. I admit, I find it preferable to Barrayaran ignorance, but it has its flaws.”

She turned to face her son. Looking past his physical peculiarities was an ingrained habit, but now she tried to focus on his appearance. What would a girl his age see? What would she have seen, at fifteen? Sharp, intelligent features on a head that seemed disproportionately large for the undersized body. A back not quite straight, a small but perceptible hitch in his gait. But he could walk, not to mention ride any horse in his grandfather’s stable, he had endured so much and come so far from the tiny, twisted baby they had taken from the replicator. What girl would see beyond the damage that had proved unfixable, to the wholeness so painstakingly achieved?

“You’re not well suited for casual sex, Miles. You’ve got too much context for that sort of, I don’t know, disposable desire. I wasn’t, either. When I was a little older than you…” Cordelia hesitated, unsure how much of her own experience she wanted to share. “I fell in love, or what I thought was love. Looking back, I think I just fell in love with being wanted and desired and needed. But what he wanted wasn’t me. And trying to be what he wanted turned out to be lonelier than being alone.”

Miles tried to imagine his mother as a lonely teenager, and failed. He had never known her to be anything but confident. Even his formidable grandfather could not intimidate this woman, who had ended a civil war by sneaking into Vorbarr Sultana and returning with the Pretender’s head in a shopping bag.

He shook his head. “Doesn’t apply here. Even if I tried to be what they wanted, it’s physically impossible. I can’t fool anyone into thinking I’m Ivan Vorpatril. What you see—” he waved a hand at his leg-brace and orthopedic shoe—“is what you get.”

“What they see is what you make them see,” she said firmly. “You have the advantages and disadvantages of your birth and your parentage, Miles, just as Ivan does. He’s grown up with good looks and social status. He has also had no father, a mother who wants to manage his entire life for him, and, to be perfectly frank, an intellectual capacity rather less than your own. Those are his gifts, and his tests, to do with as he will.”

She waved an arm at the long windows and the garden beyond, where a figure in brown and silver patrolled the walls. “You have this. Vorkosigan House and Aral and me, and the injuries you were dealt because you are our son. I have regretted those injuries, every day of your life, but they have made you who you are.”

“I just want…” Miles paused. “What you have, with Father, I guess.”

“Your father and I…took a rather complicated route to find each other. It didn’t happen on the first try. We weren’t virgins when we met, either of us.” She paused, remembering Sergyar, the blasted ruins of a Betan camp, a man in rumpled fatigues sleeping while his putative captive kept the night watch. “In fact, we were enemies. I was a prisoner of the Imperium, in his custody, for the first three days of our acquaintance.” In a way I still am, Cordelia mused. A lifetime hostage to Barrayaran politics, and my son with me. “And yet, somehow we managed to see past the uniforms to the people inside them. Maybe that’s what they mean when they say love is blind.”

A soft-toned bell rang. “Dinner,” said Miles.

“Already? Oh, General Vorbaden will be joining us. I’m sure your father would appreciate it if you would put on something slightly more presentable.” She turned to the mirror, her posture shifting into what he privately thought of as her Lady Vorkosigan Persona.

“Just Vorbaden, or the whole crew?” he asked.

“The general, Lady Vorbaden, and Helena. They’re considering letting her go to Beta Colony next year, so expect questions.”

Miles grinned. “I’ll try not to scare anyone.”

“Be down in ten minutes, please?” The Countess bent to kiss her son’s forehead, and was gone in a whirl of skirts. Miles picked up a tunic from the floor, wondering if it was too rumpled to pass for presentable.

So love was blind? That sounded like a paradox, given how clearly his parents seemed to see each other. He had watched them both playing their roles, the Lord Regent and his Lady, for social or political reasons, but when the guests left, there was no pretense. Together, they could be Aral and Cordelia, nothing more or less than their honest selves. He twisted the tunic between his hands, caught between admiration and envy. Was it even possible, that one day he would be seen that way, truly seen: not as the Lord Regent’s son, or Count Vorkosigan’s heir, or a crippled mutie? Simply...Miles Naismith Vorkosigan.

Whoever that might be.

He wondered if Elena was here in the city , or still at Vorkosigan Surleau. He hadn’t seen her since he’d left for Beta Colony, a year ago. Would she think he had changed? She had known him his entire life.

Maybe she was blind enough to see him.

**Author's Note:**

> Originally published in the Bujold Fic community on Livejournal.
> 
> If Gregor were here, he might request and require his loyal subjects to leave a comment. Admiral Naismith, on the other hand, would just make it an order, whether you were technically under his command or not, and hope that forward momentum would cause comments to occur.


End file.
